Personal care compositions are becoming more popular in the United States and around the world. Personal care compositions are well known and widely used. Desirable personal care composition must meet a number of criteria. For example, in order to be acceptable to consumers, a personal care composition must exhibit good cleaning properties, must exhibit good lathering characteristics, must be mild to the skin (not cause drying or irritation) and preferably should even provide a conditioning benefit to the skin. Personal care compositions have also been used to alter the color and appearance of skin.
Personal care compositions that attempt to provide skin-conditioning benefits are known. Many of these compositions are aqueous systems comprising an emulsified conditioning oil or other similar materials in combination with a lathering surfactant. Although these products provide both conditioning and cleansing benefits, it is often difficult to formulate a product that deposits sufficient amount of skin conditioning agents on skin during use. In order to combat emulsification of the skin conditioning agents by the cleansing surfactant, large amounts of the skin conditioning agent are added to the compositions. However, this introduces another problem associated with these dual cleansing and conditioning products. Raising the level of skin conditioning agent in order to achieve increased deposition negatively affects product lather performance and stability.
One attempt at providing conditioning and cleansing benefits from a personal cleansing product while maintaining stability has been the use of dual-chamber packaging. These packages comprise separate cleansing compositions and conditioning compositions, and allow for the co-dispensing of the two in a single or dual stream. The separate conditioning and cleansing compositions thus remain physically separate and stable during prolonged storage and just prior to application, but then mix during or after dispensing to provide conditioning and cleansing benefits from a physically stable system. Although such dual-chamber delivery systems provide improved conditioning benefits over the use of conventional systems, it is often difficult to achieve consistent and uniform performance because of the uneven dispensing ratio between the cleansing phase and the conditioning phase from these dual-chamber packages. Additionally, these packaging systems add considerable cost to the finished product.
Accordingly, the need still remains for stable, mild, multi-phased personal care composition that provides cleansing with increased lather longevity and improved lathering characteristics, and skin benefits such as silky skin feel, improved soft skin feel, and improved smooth skin feel. The need also remains for a personal care composition comprising two phases in physical contact that remain stable for long periods of time.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a mild multi-phased personal care composition comprising visually distinct phase comprising a surfactant having a structured domain combined with a second visually distinct phase that can comprise high levels of benefit components that are not emulsified in the composition but comprised in a separate benefit phase so that the benefit components can be deposited at higher levels while at the same time maintaining superior lather performance.